The Calm Before The Storm
by rayon.de.soleil
Summary: Did Ron or Hermione ever expect such a turbulent sixth year? Set before HBP
1. Chapter 1

A/N: set just before HBP. the evening before Harry arrives at the Weasley's.

Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter. If I did, I doubt I'd be checking the time every 5 minutes, counting down the hours to the release of Deathly Hallows.

**Hermione**

Hermione Granger was sitting in an armchair in the corner of the Weasley's living room pretending to read a book.

It wasn't that her book (Ye Olde Castles and Monuments of Magikal Britaine) wasn't interesting – to her at least – it was just that there were more important things to be observed in that room that Friday evening.

Ron Weasley, her best friend for the past five years, was currently having a horrendously brutal game of wizard's chess with his elder brother Bill. Ron was sitting cross-legged in front of the dying fire facing Hermione, whilst his long-haired brother leant over the chess board set out between them.

There were many things that Hermione knew she was supposed to be thinking about this evening, but somehow they had all been pushed to one side of her brain when she'd first looked up from her book to see Ron staring at her, a rare look of seriousness upon his face.

When he saw her look up at him, he had raised his eyebrows and grinned at her for a moment before returning to the game; from then on, Hermione had lost all interest in her book and all thoughts of Harry, Sirius and school had been swept out of her head.

Moments like these had been occurring all throughout last year. Of course Hermione, a girl who was top of all her classes at Hogwarts knew exactly what they meant. She just wished she knew whether Ron knew. Or if he even noticed anything different.

Because of course, things were much different from how they'd been say, two years ago. Their turbulent friendship had gone from blazing rows to shyness and awkwardness. They still argued. All the time in fact, but there were moments now that certainly weren't there in third year.

She supposed it had all changed in their fourth year.

After spending lengthy periods of time with Ron, desperately trying to get him to make up with Harry, she found that there was now no denying the fact that had been hounding her for a while: she liked Ron.

She, Hermione Granger liked Ron Weasley.

His name had been scrawled, printed out neatly and placed in little hearts all over her impeccable notes. She couldn't get his laugh out of her head and each time he smiled at her she had to look away for fear of becoming a breathing replica of a beetroot.

Hermione had finally fallen for her hopeless best friend. The one who had an exact 5ml emotional capacity and also the one who she had spent an entire year arguing with over a cat and a dubious rat.

Then came the Yule Ball where she'd spent a week wondering whether by some lucky chance she'd end up going with Ron – they were best friends after all – until Bulgarian Quidditch star Viktor Krum asked her in an offhand tone one afternoon in the library. She took up his offer, brushing away all hopes of going with Ron – why would he want to go with her anyway? He'd probably disregarded her a long time ago as a possible ball candidate after finding her nose was 2mm too far to the left.

Then after a year spent mostly in Ron's company during DA meetings and whilst Harry attended detentions and Occlumency lessons, she had come to realise something she had sworn she would never succumb to when she was younger.

Last summer she had been thrust into the company of Ron and his family and her and Ron managed to spend the longest amount of time together that had ever been endured without Harry to keep the peace. Sure she had Ginny too, but Ron was her best friend so she was obliged to spend the majority of her time with him.

Although, obligation wasn't exactly the word Hermione's heart was thumping out when Ron wrote to ask her to come and stay at Grimmauld Place with him that holiday, or when Dumbledore explained that it would be better if Harry stayed at the Dursley's for the time being. Of course, Hermione didn't like to keep Harry in the dark about what was going on, but there was a part of her that was glad for the chance to be alone with Ron, to talk to him, to get to know him better, maybe explain what she had been thinking when Viktor had asked her to the ball that Christmas… No. She was never going to have done that.

Apart from not telling Ron exactly what she was thinking that summer, she did get to talk to him and get to know him more than she had in four years.

She also got the opportunity to see him from a different angle. Not just physically – although she enjoyed seeing him brush his hair back from his face as they played wizard's chess on his bed, or watching his blue eyes flash when she told him she neither knew nor cared anything about Quidditch teams, or getting a glimpse of his back muscles stretching as he cleaned out a dresser one day. It was just as satisfying to admire the way he stood up to his older brothers but the way he backed down from Ginny, the way he doubled up at one of Mundungus' vulgar jokes and then creased up again when he saw Hermione's puzzled expression and heard her saying 'What? I don't get it.' The way he pulled her aside as they helped clear the table and explained it to her.

All these things. All these tiny things she had started to notice about him added up to one thing in her mind. She had always looked at things logically and here there was only one explanation. She had fallen in love. After all these years of swearing she wouldn't do it, she had fallen for Ronald Weasley. It wasn't just that she admired these quirks about him. It was that she had noticed them in the first place. How could you know all these things about someone and not be in love with them?

She still got angry at him and this made her doubt the L-word, but when she truly thought about it, the reason she got so angry with him was usually due to the frustration she felt when he said something flippant, offhand or completely careless. However, at the same time, this was what made her like him so much. Mostly to her, he wasn't so much careless as carefree. She wished she could be like that sometimes.

Hermione glanced over at him once more. His eyes were darkened and focused on the game before him, his brow furrowed in concentration, his mouth clenched at one side. One hand was in his hair and as he pushed it back, he looked up and caught her gaze.

She dropped her eyes back to her book and turned the page guiltily. She mustn't be caught looking again.

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A/N: sooooo this is like my first attempt at writing anything serious. next chap will be ron's thoughts then will do a scene or two between them. it's not really a ron and hermione coming together story - i don't want to interfere with whatever jk's got in store - but more like a missing moment. review please! x


	2. Chapter 2

**Ron**

There was only one way he could get out of this one. It could turn out nasty… but no. It had to be done.

If he moved his rook then Bill would take it, but if he moved the queen then that pawn would take it and he couldn't sacrifice a queen to a pawn.

He looked up, the layout of the chessboard still imprinted in his brain. His mother was sitting by the window, shut tight against the weird mist drifting across their garden. The wireless on the table next to her was turned down low and Ginny, sitting cross-legged at her mother's feet was humming along to the tune it was playing out.

Next to his mother and his sister was Fleur, draped across the sofa, reading his mother's copy of Witch Weekly. Fleur, with her dazzling hair flowing round her shoulders and her slender legs stretched out in front of her, was not the person Ron wanted to be looking at tonight. And it was not because she was engaged to his brother, Bill.

The reason why his eyes weren't drawn to the part Veela this evening, was sitting on the other side of the room in a patched armchair.

Hermione. Her hair was pulled up messily away from her face and her dark eyes were strained from reading in the dim lights but for Ron there was nothing on earth he'd rather watch.

Everything about her fascinated him. The way curls came loose of her bun and caught the light, the long periods of time it seemed she could go without blinking, the way her nose twitched every so often. She was folded up in the armchair, her usual heavy book resting on her lap, one arm curved around it, the other resting across the page, a slender finger flicking the corner, itching to turn it.

He might have been imagining it, but her steady gaze seemed even more fixed than usual, as if she wasn't reading, but had her mind on something else.

She looked so deliciously soft and feminine, curled up in that old chair in the dim light, her thick hair in wisps about her face, that Ron had to take a steadying breath to stop himself from…he didn't know what. Whenever he saw her, he felt like grinning, laughing or jumping around the room like a lunatic for reasons he couldn't fathom.

However, Ron wasn't an idiot, contrary to the beliefs of Fred and George who often told him so. He knew why he'd been looking at Hermione to start with. A year ago, he'd have been utterly bewildered, but during his fifth year of knowing her, he'd had to face the facts.

He liked her. He liked everything about her.

Last summer, he emerged from a school year wrought with confusion. Harry had finished the Triwizard Tournament with a final task almost resulting in his death. But Harry would pull through and Dumbledore would deal with You-Know-Who. The thing Ron didn't know how to deal with was something that had been thrust at him at Christmas.

Seeing Hermione walk into the Yule Ball with _him _was like a slap in the face. The nerve of it.

Hermione, _his _Hermione was with that oaf. Okay, so she wasn't exactly his. But she was his friend. Harry's friend. And Harry was competing against Krum. It wasn't right.

But somehow he was unable to convey her wrong doings into words that didn't cause her to want to wring his neck. She told him later that he should have asked her to the ball if he didn't want her to go with anyone else.

He went to bed that night feeling confused and wrong-footed. But when he woke in the morning, he felt as though he'd been doused in cold water by the same hand that had slapped him in the face the night before.

He now understood what Hermione had meant. Or he thought he had. He figured she hadn't meant it the way he had initially taken it.

But either way, it caused him to realise exactly why he hadn't liked seeing her on the arm of that Bulgarian git. He had been jealous. And she was right; he should have asked her first.

These realisations came all too suddenly for Ron. He had barely thought of Hermione like that before. The month before, she had simply been his friend, albeit a friend who infuriated him more than anyone. Now, he had been forced to look at her differently; he was entirely confused by it all at first. The only real feeling he could define was the pronounced anger he felt when that thief of a Quidditch star went anywhere near her. Although he finally concluded that Krum had her affection, he always had a twisted triumphant feeling that he was the only one who could make her as angry as he did.

Ron had been shocked into admitting his feelings for Hermione but he put an end to all thoughts of confessing them to her when he realised she was still in contact with Krum. He had asked her to go to Bulgaria to visit him and although she told Ron she had turned him down, it had been very obvious to him that she would much rather be on Vicky's broomstick than holed up with him in Grimmauld Place.

However, there was no denying the past year had been good. They're fights had been few and far between. He had even received a kiss from her at one point, although he admitted it wasn't like the kisses he dreamt of as he slept in the fifth year boy's dorm.

As the thought of her soft cheek against his flew through his mind for the millionth time, her eyes flicked up from her book to immediately rest on his own.

The skin around her eyes was dark and tired, but her eyes themselves were bright and sparkling. He shot a smile at her before turning his attention back to the chess game. He wondered if she'd ever thought of him as more than a friend, ever wondered, as he himself had done, whether one of their huge arguments could turn into something more.

But he dismissed this thought as easily as his knight knocked the head off Bill's pawn.

He looked up at her again and caught her warm brown eyes watching him. Quickly, she returned her eyes to her book and turned a page.

Was that a faint blush rising in her cheeks? Or was it the warmth of the fire?

He certainly knew it wasn't the fire making his own ears burn as he resumed the game before him.

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A/N: second chapter .. oh yesh. what an achievement for me. hope you will review.. all are v appreciated. off for breakfast now my darlings. x


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